What should you be doing during a recession?

The answer is mostly the same things when the economy is not in a recession – taking care of basics first. These things include:
• Interview perspective employees regularly and don’t try and hide it. Regular interviewing has a lot of advantages. It keeps your interviewing skills sharp and provides you with a lot of recent resumes should you need someone in a hurry. It also puts your staff on notice that they are not indispensible.
• Adjust your marketing plans to be in-line with expected sales. Spending more on advertising when people aren’t hitting the doors might seem like the right thing, but in my experience, if the public isn’t ready to buy, they won’t. Conversely, spending nothing is probably not a wise idea either. The few people that are spending need to know that you are still in business. I believe that the better plan is to spend no more and no less than what you normally would as a percentage of the sales that you can expect.
• Treat your customers better than ever. They are always valuable, but today more than ever.
• Keep your premises looking clean, neat and the shelves stocked. You need to always appear to be ready to do business even if the number of people coming through the doors is down.
• Evaluate one of your major business processes each week. Operating on a reduced staff as many businesses are today puts your staff under a considerable amount of stress. Stress that will eventually affect your customers. This can be reduced by reviewing and eliminating things that people do that are no longer as important as they once might have been.

As the leader of your business, it’s always your job to be looking ahead and only thing that I know for certain in these uncertain times is that this recession, like all the others before it, will eventually pass into history.